The present invention relates to methods and systems for navigating a computer network.
Two commonly-used techniques for navigating to destinations of a computer network, such as the enternet, include: (a) manually entering a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) into a command line of a Web browser, and (b) clicking on a hyperlink displayed by a Web browser. Manually entering URLs having a long sequence of characters may be undesirable for some end users.
Various recently-proposed techniques for navigating to destinations of the Internet use bar codes to obviate manual entering of URLs. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,930,767, 5,938,726, 5,940,595, 5,969,324, 5,986,651, 5,995,105, 6,032,195 and 6,081,827, which are assigned to Motorola, Inc. and are hereby incorporated by reference into the present disclosure, disclose various approaches to computer network navigation using bar codes.
Regardless of whether a user manually enters a URL, clicks on a hyperlink or swipes a bar code, interaction with the destination may have a less than desired performance. International Business Machines (IBM) has announced a bandwidth allocation technology which allows information to be prioritized according to different levels of priority. The bandwidth allocation technology runs on a network processor within a computer network element such as a router or a switch.